President Obama easily could dial back deportations: Tim Rutten

Renewed hope for some sort of immigration reform drew a few gasping breaths in Washington last week, after House Speaker John Boehner signaled a willingness to consider something short of a “path to citizenship” for the nation’s estimated 12 million undocumented residents.

The tea party-aligned members of his own Republican caucus, however, essentially strangled the legislative infant in its crib. Immigration reform, his members told him, was a no-go with the right-wing base that nowadays dominates most GOP primaries. In their circles antipathy to undocumented immigrants runs deep and, for many of the movement’s strategists, the path to citizenship is synonymous with more registered Democrats. Demography may be destiny, but the Southern Republicans, particularly in states like Texas, plan to hold it at bay for as long as possible. In the meantime, they’re busily using the Supreme Court’s recent rollback of the Voting Rights Act to disenfranchise as many people of color as malevolent ingenuity allows.

Just because Washington has settled back into its gridlock-as-usual, however, there’s no reason President Barack Obama can’t take unilateral steps to bring a touch of humanity and bit of reasonable justice to the tortured limbo in which so many hardworking — and economically indispensable — newcomers without papers now find themselves. The president recently has spoken of his new willingness to use executive orders to circumvent unacceptable congressional stasis. In this case, though, there’s no need to get around obstructionist lawmakers. All that’s required is that the chief executive re-examine and amend his own conduct.

The truth is that Obama has long talked one way about immigration and acted another. Rhetorically, he’s been all for comprehensive reform, including a path to citizenship, and — to be fair — he has acted to protect young immigrants brought to this country as small children by their families. All of this, of course, has helped cement the loyalties of increasingly Latino voters to the Democratic Party, particularly given the intransigence and outright hostility to immigrants consistently advanced by so many Republicans. On the other hand, the president and his administration have pursued the most draconian deportation program since the end of the Second World War.

Since Obama took office, the United States has deported nearly two million undocumented immigrants, more than under any previous president. Last year alone, 369,000 were forcibly repatriated to their native countries, nine times the number deported 20 years ago. The only reason more weren’t expelled was that the immigration courts and detention centers already are working to capacity. While the immigration officers once confined most of their activities to our southern border areas, they’re now actively pursuing immigrants all over the country. Today, Washington spends more to apprehend and deport people without papers than it goes on all other federal law enforcement activities combined. That’s right — more chasing maids and dish washers and gardeners than on all its efforts to arrest drug kingpins or regulating Wall Street swindlers.

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In an editorial accompanying a scathing report on what it calls America’s “vindictive and self-defeating ... deportation machine,” The Economist magazine posed the perfectly sensible question: “Why would a supposedly liberal president oversee something so illiberal, cruel and pointless?”

Why, indeed?

The fact is that experts who provide our most reliable estimates on the population of newcomers without papers now say that the numbers leaving the country far exceed those entering. The president and his aides say they have no choice but to enforce the existing laws, and that nearly all those being expelled have been convicted of some crime other than unlawful entry. That’s partly true. In 1996, another Republican majority in Congress greatly expanded the number of crimes requiring deportation, in many cases reclassifying what are misdemeanors under state law into “aggravated felonies” under the federal immigration code. The lawmakers also abolished the statute of limitations, so that today we’re deporting people as felons for misdemeanors committed 20 or more years ago.

Deportations remained low, however, simply because the resources didn’t exist to enforce the law to its draconian potential. Then came 9/11 and, as The Economist put it in its report, “by an odd jump of logic, a mass murder committed by mostly Saudi terrorists resulted in an almost limitless amount of money being made available for the deportation of Mexican housepainters.” In 2008, establishment of the so-called Secure Communities initiative linked local law enforcement agencies to the federal immigration data base via computer. Deportations skyrocketed except in the handful of cities — like Los Angeles with its long-standing “Special Order 40” — where local law enforcement agencies are forbidden to inquire about someone’s immigration status in the course of routine police work.

The result has been jammed immigration courts — more than 1 million cases are pending at this moment, or about 5,000 for every sitting judge — and tragically splintered families. Over the past two years, 205,000 parents were deported, leaving behind children who are citizens because they were born in this country. Many of the deportees have lived most of their own adult lives in the United States, working and paying taxes, and know little or nothing about the native countries where they’re dumped without resources or even the wherewithal to make a phone call. In such cases the legal process may be called deportation, but in human terms what’s occurring is exile. Except in the cases of that small number of truly violent felons, who should be deported, no one benefits from this wrenching, involuntary exodus — certainly not the immigrants, their families or the American employers who required their labor to run their businesses and till their fields.

When the president says — as he recently did in San Francisco — that he has no choice but to keep this inhumane and wasteful machine in motion, it’s utter nonsense. Every president and every Justice Department gives higher priority to enforcing some of the innumerable federal laws and regulations than it does to others. Just ask the overworked and outgunned Securities and Exchange officials futilely trying to police Wall Street.

The most charitable construction to be given the president’s current approach to this issue is that he’s operating under the misguided hope that creating maximum pain and dissatisfaction with the current system will speed the cause of reform. A more cynical interpretation would be that he finds it expedient to talk reform to voters of Latino descent, while quietly pandering to the nativist sentiment by treating the immigrants and their families as pawns.

Neither explanation does him much credit.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.